What gives this fear its awful force is that, unlike plenty of others that trouble us from time to time, it will someday come true. There is no “if” about whether you will lose your loved ones; there is only the how and the when. To those of us with active imaginations, such questions are a torment. “Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not?” asks the Unetaneh Tokef, that eerie and lovely liturgical poem that Jews recite on the Day of Atonement. And when we do each reach our end, “who by sword and who by wild beast, who by famine and who by thirst, who by earthquake and who by plague, who by strangulation and who by stoning?” Those lines are evocative but incomplete, and it is easy to lie awake at night adding our own verses. Who by cancer and who by car accident? Who by heart attack and who by stroke? Who by firearm and who by flu and who by falling?
That list goes on and on, long and strange and sad enough to account for even the most shocking demise. So omnipresent and protean is death that there is, as Montaigne wrote, “no place from which it may not come to us,” so that we “turn our heads constantly this way and that as in a suspicious country.” Perhaps we will be among the fortunate, and all that vigilance will turn out to have been unnecessary; perhaps our loved ones will die peacefully, in old age, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. But what a cruelty that love, which wants only to tend and protect, should ultimately be so powerless to do so, that we must relegate to fate the most important thing in our lives, the well-being of those we hold dearest. To be happy is to have a lot of hap, that archaic word for luck: our joy, our bliss, is left terrifyingly up to chance.
It may be, of course, that I am unusually troubled by this problem. One of the difficulties of writing about one’s own emotional life is that it is impossible to know how representative it is—how much it overlaps with or diverges from everyone else’s inmost experience. Some people, I am sure, are spared by their psychology or their cosmology from worrying all that much about their loved ones. But I myself have always possessed a catastrophic what-if machine. Even as a very young child, I would lie awake in my bedroom on nights when my parents left my sister and me home with a babysitter, my mind full of drunk drivers and dark alleys and freak accidents, my fear relieved only by the sound of their car hitting the gravelly base of our driveway.
Over the years, I have grown more rational and better at self-soothing but at heart no less afraid, and falling in love has only exacerbated the problem. All my endless imaginary tragedies befall C. now, and when she is out somewhere without me, the car I listen for in the dark is hers. For that matter, even having her safely home beside me cannot always ease my fears. Sometimes, I rest my head against her chest and listen—as I suppose all lovers have done from time immemorial—to the beating of her heart, and although I cherish the feel of her body and the sense of taking refuge there so near the core of her, it never fails to worry me a little. C. has a naturally rapid heart rate, much as she has a breakneck metabolism and can bound through a busy day on absurdly little sleep, and I sometimes worry that all this means that she is burning her brilliant candle too quickly—that someday far too soon, she will leave me alone in an unbanishable darkness.
Whether or not that comes to pass, however, the larger issue remains. We will each die, C. and I, and in addition to the how and the when, we are now both afflicted with the lovers’ haunting question of which one of us will do so first. I imagine that many spouses have made each other unkeepable promises, have talked, as C. and I have done, about dying together in very old age in our sleep: entering death as we have entered almost every night and morning of our shared life, holding each other close, grateful and at peace.
Has any couple in the history of the world been so lucky? Perhaps one or two. But the odds are grievously against us. In all likelihood, one of us will leave the other alone in bed at night, alone on waking up to face the day: me, if we go by actuarial tables, because I am older; C., if we go by premonitions, because she had one, when she was a little girl, about dying young—a story I wish she had never told me, because now and then it fills me with a dread as huge and cold as the ocean. I do not want to die—it is impossible to overstate how true that is—but I would rather face my own death than survive hers. I cannot imagine that I will ever stop feeling this way, even if I am lucky and my fears for C. prove as premature as my childhood ones for my parents, and we are still tending our wildflowers together half a century hence. Yet even in that case I know how little balm, once the time comes, all that time will be. I have never forgotten a heartbreaking line in a letter I once received: “How fortunate I have been—and yet I wanted it to last longer.” That was from my great-uncle, widowed after sixty-two years.
If anything, like all shadows, this one that trails behind love grows longer later in the day. When I was a child, death seemed like a contingency, an emergency, even though I understood in the abstract that it would come for all of us eventually. But after my father died I began to feel its inevitability, and I know that it will only grow more present with each passing year. We find things and lose things at all stages of life, but the overall distribution shifts over time, and loss strikes both more often and with more devastating intimacy as we age. And so the kind of difficulties we face shift as we grow older, too. The first problem that love presents us with is how to find it. But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.
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Something like an answer to that question came to me on the most recent anniversary of my father’s death. I had woken up early that day, into an ebbing darkness, with the unsettled feeling that there was something I should be doing. I recognized it right away—the feeling, I mean. It was the disquiet that anniversary always brings me, a sense of aimlessness brought about by having no good way to commemorate the occasion. Other than burning a yahrzeit candle, as Jews do on days of remembrance, I have never really known how to honor the steady accretion of years without my father. The conventional options, such as they are, are unavailable; because we donated his body to a medical school, there is no grave to visit, no place to return to where we scattered his ashes. C., who grew up (as I did not) with a tradition of regularly visiting the cemeteries where her relatives are buried, asked me, not long after he died, if I would like to have a stone of some kind carved for him and set out on our property where I could sit with it when I chose. At the time, I joked that I was pretty sure my father would rather spend the rest of eternity inside on a bookshelf; but either way, I never did have any kind of memorial made. Nor did I ever devise any strategy for recognizing occasions like the day of his birth and the day of his death, even though it has always seemed to me important and right to do so.